THE Global Justice Movement Website

THE Global Justice Movement Website
This is the "Global Justice Movement" (dot org) we refer to in the title of this blog.

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

For Your Viewing Pleasure: "The Last Laugh"

Here is a link to a video that, in addition to being very entertaining, also manages to summarize in a very pithy and humorous fashion how the sub-prime mortgage crisis kick-started the financial meltdown. Just as we've been trying to say (in less humorous and much more lengthy fashion), the underlying problem was the misuse of credit, coupled with economic power concentrated in the hands of a relatively few people.

When a single individual uses credit unwisely for consumption or speculation, only that individual and those from whom he or she borrowed suffer when he or she cannot pay back the money. When the misuse of credit for consumption, speculation, and government expenditures becomes systemic, however, the entire financial arrangement of society is endangered and private property is undermined. Further, political structures are weakened or destroyed, along with individual and personal sovereignty, social stability, and a country's international position, as Henry C. Adams warned in his 1898 monograph Public Debt: An Essay in the Science of Finance.

By the way, we did not add the Spanish subtitles, although they should be very useful.

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